A group of hardware engineers working for Instrumental took apart one of the few Note 7s and discovered that the explosive nature of the phone was due to a "fundamental problem with the design”.

Samsung must have suspected this “super aggressive" design was a risk, but went ahead with it anyway as the company wanted an edge – so to speak.

What is bad about this whole story is that if Instrumental is right, they must have known when the first problems cropped up that it was not a faulty battery and that the recall was an exercise in futility.

Instrumental’s Anna Shedletsk said that if it was only a battery part problem it could have been salvaged by a re-spin of the battery. It did not make sense to cancel the product line and cede several quarters of revenue to competitors.

She said that Samsung had stuffed the battery in the casing so that it was so tightly packed that pressure from natural swelling and stress placed on the Note 7 body was damaging the battery’s separator layers that keep the positive and negative layers apart.

“That pressure could be enough to squeeze the thin polymer separator to a point where the positive and negative layers can touch, causing the battery to explode,” writes Shedletsky.

Battery swell requires there to be a ceiling above a battery, roughly equivalent to 10 percent of its size to allow expansion. From that equation, the Note 7 should have had a 0.5mm ceiling but it did not have any.

Samsung was trapped by the problem that it wanted to make a smartphone that was super thin and sleek while being incredibly powerful with a long battery life. It was all pretty dumb and probably the reason why the company is not saying why it handled the problem the way it did.

The latest theory as to why the Note 7 had battery problems suggests that its rather cool thin design made it go bang.

The Note 7 had an absolutely "symmetrical" design as the glass backplate is sloping towards the metal frame with the same curvature as the display at the front.

But according toPhone Arena that design might have put pressure on the unorthodox battery plates.

The steep glass curve made the device the narrowest Note ever. Leaked docs from the Korean consumer protection agency showed that the battery packs made by Samsung's own SDI subsidiary were slightly larger for their compartment by a hair, and the isolation plates that separate the anode and cathode inside were too close towards the edges.

This meant that it was prone to collapsing under pressure, short circuiting the battery, and causing a thermal runaway. The Koreans also found issues with the packaging of the battery cells, like the insulating tape, which was done by a separate company, as well as the coating of the negative electrode.

While separately these would not create the spontaneous combustion, together they were a dangerous mix. All it would take was a bit of pressure on the isolation plates which would have been provided by the design of the steepest edge curve.

The plates are apparently situated towards the edge of the battery, and, when sealing the waterproof phone tight, the pack might be subjected to a pressure that is higher than normal at the wrong end.

That particular matter does not explain the problems for the second recall. That is because the battery was smaller and fitted better. However, the abnormal pressure from the steeply curved sides remained and that could have been enough on its own to damage the battery.

It seems when the iPhone 7 catches fire no one pays any interest and no one calls for an immediate recall, or for them to banned on aircraft.

A Reddit user posted images of his or her brand new iPhone 7 Plus, that has seemingly caught fire and turned into an expensive pile of goo. It was not being recharged or anything like that. It apparently caught fire while it was in transit and the user opened the box to discover it in this state. It was lucky that the package did not catch fire and take an entire shipment with it... what I am I saying? Unfortunately, the package did not catch fire, cause an entire shipment to explode and help raise the standards of the world.

The Tame Apple Press has written the story off as a freak accident with some trying to make a rather weak gag that Apple was copying Samsung. This is the same Tame Apple Press which claimed that the Samsung Note 7 only caught fire because it was rushed into production to beat the iPhone 7 to the shops.

Our guess is that this story will continue to be ignored, although it would be a big dose of karma if Apple suffers from the same problem that the Samsung faced and more iPhone 7's go pop.

Samsung will put its Galaxy Note 7 back on the market next week after pulling millions off them after discovering faulty batteries were causing some to melt.

Note 7 sales were already supposed to resume in the company’s home country yesterday but were held off after a specific government’s request. Now it appears that Galaxy Note 7 sales are resuming on Saturday, 1 October.

Samsung’s representatives stated that the company felt this is the right time to recommence the sales as it expects over 80 per cent of recalled devices in the country will be returned by that date.

The firm didn’t reveal the percentage of recalled devices that are currently in its possession. On the other hand, Samsung has resumed Galaxy Note 7 TV ads in Korea after suspending them earlier this month when first reports of faulty batteries started surfacing.

The company has promised to cover half of all repair costs related to the device’s screen to all South Korean nationals who purchase Galaxy Note 7 during October.

Samsung is yet to officially confirm the most likely culprit is the battery manufactured by its subsidiary Samsung SDI. It’s still unclear how a faulty battery managed to escape scrutiny and end up in mass production before anyone took notice.

Initial estimates suggest that the South Korean tech giant will lose over a billion dollars due to the entire fiasco, not to mention the potential long-term damage its brand may have suffered.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 recall sounds like one of the biggest in the last few years and it looks like the company has to recover as many as 2.5 million phones from its customers. This is likely to cost Samsung close to a billion dollars and it will eat up any potential profits it was making from these phones.

Bloomberg reported that about three dozen of the devices were found to have batteries that ignited and exploded. This is a lot of phones and initiated the biggest recall in Samsung’s recent history.

Credit Suisse estimates that Samsung Electronics gets about $600 revenue and $108 of operating profit for every Note 7 it sells. Of course, after the recall, this money will be burned up by shipping and replacement costs. Doing a quick sum and assuming that the 2.5 million Note 7 number is close to the real number, Samsung will directly lose most of the $272.5 million profit that it gained from the sales of these devices.

The worst part is that after an excellent run with the super popular Galaxy S7 phones, Samsung is damaging its reputation, and this happens just days before Apple releases the iPhone 7.

Samsung said that it will replace your Note 7 with either another Note 7 or alternatively with Galaxy S7 or S7 edge, and it will refund the difference. Most of the sales affect USA and Canadian customers while the sales were halted in most European countries before the devices started shipping on September 2.

For the US customers it is not clear when they will get a replacement Note 7 if they still want to use that device. It might take days or weeks and some carriers will give customers a comparable device in the meantime, and some, it's been reported, even waived a restocking fee for their customers.

It is crystal clear that the damage to the brand and reputation is something that will cost more than money and it will make people think twice before they buy another Samsung mobile phone in the future. This will be hard to fix, but Samsung is doing the best it can to repair its damaged phones, brand and reputation.

The Tame Apple Press has been delivered an early Christmas present as its rival Samsung stops selling its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones after reports some of their batteries exploded while being charged.

It could not come at a better time as Apple is just about to announce the release of its iPhone 7 which is basically a dull refresh of its earlier models and had not been expected to sell well against the Galaxy Note range.

The tech giant said it would prepare replacement devices for those already sold. It was not immediately clear when new sales of the devices would begin. Samsung Electronics launched the Note 7 on August 19 in markets including the US. The Galaxy Note 7 smartphone is the latest iteration of Samsung's Note series. It features a giant screen and a stylus

South Korean high school teacher Park Soo-Jung told Associated Press she bought the Galaxy Note 7 and activated it on August 19.However her phone later burst into flames, filling her bedroom with smoke smelling of chemicals.

An employee of a Samsung service center in Busan who visited Park's school to retrieve the scorched phone confirmed that her Galaxy Note 7 caught fire and said the sample was sent to the company's headquarters.

"If the exploded phone in flame was near my head, I would not have been able to write this post," she said in a popular online forum on Thursday, where she shared a photo of the scorched Note 7 and described dousing the burning phone with water.

There had been an earlier explosion but this was thought to be the result of a dodgy third party cable and while that still could be the case, it is clear that there is something wrong with the Note 7's battery.

There is nothing the Tame Apple Press loves more than when one of their favourite company’s rivals products catch fire. In this case a bloke in China’s Galaxy Note 7, caught fire and exploded and the way the story has been reported you would think there was something wrong with the product.

The story comes from the Chinese forum Baidu where a bloke called 'Mr. Ni 666666' posted photos of the charred remains of his burned out Galaxy Note 7 smartphone.

The user said his Galaxy Note 7 was plugged in at night when he heard a "sudden bang". He then discovered that his phone had burst into flames. It seems that only his bank account was harmed by the explosion.

The Galaxy Note 7 is doing rather well and demand for the Samsung smartphone is outstripping supply. So this story is getting a lot of traction on sites which feel the need to give Jobs’ Mob a free plug.

Ironically the problem is to do with a plug, or more specifically a cable. For some reason known to only God and 'Mr. Ni 666666' he was using a third-party USB-C adaptor rather than the white cable included in the box with the Galaxy Note 7. After all when you have spent your cash on a nice smartphone the first thing you do is plug it into a USB-C cable which has been made by a bloke in a pub out of bits of twig and Number eight fencing wire.

There is a major problem in China with dodgy third-party USB-C cables. Google engineer Benson Leung discovered that manufacturers of a lot of the cheaper versions can’t handle high currents. Amazon has forbidden them from being sold, but in China it is still a little freer.

Reports are coming in that Nvidia’s Division graphics drivers are so buggy that they have been known to catch GPUs on fire.

More benign problems have included freezing and boot loops and what is worrying is that none of the users seem to know why. The problem might be how you installed the driver as most of the bugs appear when you pick Express Installation.

The driver at fault (364.47) was only released this week so if you upgraded you might like to roll back to the previous version.

Nvidia’s officially confirmed the issues on its website, saying it had replaced the faulty driver with a new version and was waiting on certification from Microsoft before sending it out to gamers.

There is a beta driver (364.51) already available to download from its support website. It hasn’t been approved by Microsoft but apparently it works ok. This is a bit cheaper than buying a new graphics card.

After firing encryption from its Fire Tablets, the online bookseller, Amazon has bought it back after customers complained.

Amazon quietly removed the security option when it released its latest operating system and hoped no-one would notice. However there was an outcry from customers and privacy experts. Now it seems that Amazon has back-peddled and will return the option for full-disk encryption in its spring update.

Amazon's decision to drop encryption from the Fire operating system came to light late this week. The company said it had removed the feature in a version of its Fire OS that began shipping in the fall because few customers used it. On-device encryption scrambles data so that the device can be accessed only if the user enters the correct password.

To be fair to Amazon it is hard to see why anyone would need it and it is not clear who really did the complaining. According to the Tame Apple Press the outcry is all because Apple is bravely taking on the FBI to continue allowing encyrption on mobile devices. We would have thought that encyrpting an entire Fire Tablet would be pointless as the most of the things which would be encrypted were books and videos. The only thing which would be useful to encrypt would be emails. What is telling is that Amazon users agreed and didn't use it. Maybe the Tame Apple Press could not stand it if a tech company departed from the Apple hymn sheet on the subject.

Last night at Foxconn’s main manufacturing plant in Zhengzhou, east-central China, a large fire broke out spanning several floors of the building and prompting an emergency evacuation procedure.

Source: Weibo.com

Cause of the fire are currently being investigated, according to local Chinese authorities. What is currently known is that the fire somehow originated in the ventilation pipe of the central air-conditioning system on the roof of the factory floor, according to the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone website.

On Sunday night, firefighters and rescuers began containing the incident at Apple's primary iPhone manufacturing plant and eliminating the source of the fire for several hours. Local sources are reporting there were no casualties. Production lines were also not affected.

Source: Weibo.com (January 25, 2016)

We remain skeptical of the second bit of news about production lines not being affected, however. A short clip posted to Twitter by People’s Daily, China shows several manufacturing complexes within the Zhengzhou plant engulfed in flames.

To put things into perspective, Foxconn’s factories consist of huge complexes that are often compared by some to small cities and even towns. They each include their own housing and dining facilities and employ tens to hundreds of thousands of staff.

This is not the first time a large-scale fire has broken out at Foxconn’s facilities. On May 20, 2011 at the Chengdu, south-China plant for iPad production, at least two workers were killed and sixteen injured in a blast due to a dust explosion on the production line. The blast occurred just as workers were preparing to change shifts. During that incident, emergency officials were able to quickly get the situation under control. Several reports claimed that fine powder used on the production line was somehow ignited. The plant, which opened in 2010, cost between $2 billion and $5 billion to build.

In September 2011, the company has also dealt with a fire at its Yantai, northeast-China facility. This particular facility assembled Sony laptops, PC components and printers, but nevertheless employs over 80,000 workers.